


What Are Scars But a Map of the Past?

by cheerynoir



Series: Drowning!verse [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Sex, M/M, POV Second Person, Past Child Abuse, Ramsay Bolton's take on pillow talk, Ramsay is his own warning, Scars, Sexual Content, Tattoos, Theon makes terrible life choices, foster kid Theon, jumpy timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 09:56:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3565394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheerynoir/pseuds/cheerynoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>January-July</em>
</p><p>Ramsay touches Theon's tattoos like he wants to erase them.</p><p> It's a stark contrast to the reverence he shows his boy's scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Are Scars But a Map of the Past?

Ramsay touches your tattoos like he wants to erase them. He rakes his fingernails over the jellyfish spilling down your spine like watercolours until the skin breaks, he rings the poem etched on your ribs with bite-marks. There are words on your wrists and forearms that he’s blotted out with bruises and rope-burn, however temporarily.

It’s a stark contrast to the reverence that he shows yours scars.

His hands are warm and the closest thing to gentle you’ve felt in a very long time when he skims his fingers across the line stretching shoulder to shoulder across your back. It almost tickles when he touches the poorly-healed scar-tissue high up on the back of your thigh. He discovers the jagged bite-mark on the back of your calf with chilly toes. He’s taken your face in his hands before, so carefully, tracing the small scars there with eyes and lips and finger-tips. Outer eye, eyebrow, lower lip, like he’s memorizing.

“How did you get that?” he asks, once, rubbing a thumb across one of the many little scars on your knuckles. You shrug, roll over, and drag the sheets up as best you can one-handed. The room smells like salt and sex.

“Busting my hands up on some guy’s teeth, probably, I don’t remember.”

“And these?” 

“Punched a mirror when I was fourteen. Stupid,” you mutter, wishing he’d just shut up and let you sleep. You ache. The afterglow never lasts as long as it should, with him. Remembering the mirror, and why you’d broken it didn’t help. You’d had problem skin until you were eighteen or so – and looking at it some days, at the grease that clogged your pores and slicked your hair, made you physically ill. The day of the mirror had been overwhelming. Breaking something had been the only outlet, it felt like. Fucking up your hand was a small price to pay, even if Robb had cussed you out for it as his father picked glass out of your knuckles with a set of tweezers. 

You shake off the memory as best you can and wait. But Ramsay’s quiet, and you fall asleep to the sound of his breathing before he can ask another question.

***

You give Ramsay your back a few weeks later, resigned to the fact that he’s spending the night in your bed, and you, in turn, will not sleep well because of it. You regret the invitation when you feel his palm on your skin, tracing the long, raised line from shoulder to shoulder, as soft as the kisses you never exchange might be. You’re not sure how kisses should really feel, not sure what fairytale romance feels like if not hands on your neck and hot breath on your face and your body belonging to someone else for a while. This isn’t a fairytale, you know that, but for now you like it well enough.

“This one?” he asks, low and sleepy, familiar hands tracing languidly across your skin.

“Seventh foster family,” you reply, pressing your face into a folded arm. He makes a questioning sound, and the words spill from you slowly, water, maybe, or mercury, “On Great Wyk. They were this old couple, grandparents, really. Fundamentalists. ‘To be cleansed, you must atone.’ You had to confess whatever you fucked up – to them, and to the Drowned God.” You yawn, curl up a little tighter, and resolutely do not lean back into the hand tracing back-and-forth across your back. “So you’d confess every night, and they’d cane you until the skin broke, and you’d have to go swim laps in the ocean until they figured you were clean again. Rinse and repeat.”

“Were you there long?”

“Long enough. I was ten.” 

It becomes a habit, a pattering of quiet words and sleepy caresses late at night, and you don’t care enough to tell him to stop. He’s a nosy fucker, and it’s easier just to tell him than deal with the fallout if you don’t. 

(Sometimes, you worry about that, about the blood flowers such seeds will sow. Normally you’re too exhausted to spare it much thought. It’s worth it – no one you’ve fucked around with has ever taken you out of your head quite like Ramsay does. You like the vacation, the permission to just _be_. Or so you tell yourself afterward.)

***

“This one? It’s new.” Light fingers tracing the nick through your right eyebrow. 

“Victarion pulled out my piercing the last time I was around when he was drinking,” you mumble through a yawn a few weeks later. “Apparently Greyjoy men don’t pierce their faces like whores. News to me.”

“This one?” His lips linger at the outside corner of your left eye. You pull away and wipe at the spot. 

“My father wore rings.”

He smiles a little, doesn’t press. It would almost be comforting, if his smile didn’t seem like such a slap.

You shut your eyes and pretend to sleep.

***

He’s got you on your knees, muffling curses into the sheets, and you can’t see him when he’s behind you like this, but it doesn’t unsettle you as much as it used to. His hands are heavy on your skin, and he moves you how he wants without having to try. You let yourself be manhandled, but you give ground – moans and sighs and insults – only when he drags it from you.

“A-ah – fuck. Fuck. This one, right here, how did—”

He pinches the spot and laughs when you swear at him with the tongue of every sailor you ever grew up around. “Tell me, come on, sweetling, one more story—”

He doesn’t let you come until you’ve told him – just pushes you close to the edge and yanks you back at the last second, until you’re sobbing and twisting helplessly in his grip. He likes it when you cry, and you try not to think about that too often.

“Starks,” you gasp at last. He yanks your head back by the hair and sinks his teeth into your neck, and you come all over yourself without being touched. You’d be embarrassed if you could think at all.

“And here I thought they were the perfect family,” he muses after. You think you hear pride in his voice, maybe some joy, but that doesn’t make sense so you chalk it up to rough sex and hard touches and you mishearing. You light a cigarette and slump back into the soiled sheets. There’s blood dotting them here and there, and you put you free hand to your neck, where it still runs thick between your fingers.

“Yeah, well, turns out they don’t like it much when you steal from them,” you reply, as blithely as you know how. You’d been trying to get them to send you back to the group home in your first month – you’d rather fend for yourself there than exist on the crumbs of pity flung to you from the cop who splintered your family in the first place – but all they’d given you was a thrashing and a grounding and a list of rules to follow. They did not apologize, and they did not acknowledge the scars already on your body. They must have seen, though.

You think about that a lot sometimes. That they must have seen.

Sprawled beside you on sheets that a thousand washing couldn’t clean, Ramsay laughs and steals your cigarette. You let him. It’s a long night.

***

“Do you trust me, pet?”

That’s how you end up with an X carved into the meat of your right bicep. You don’t mind the pain as much as you might have before, because he lavishes the mark with attention as soon as the skin has knit back, pink and perfect. (You don’t think about that, though.)

Weeks later, he asks about it like all the others, smiling, and you just raise your eyebrows.

“You were there,” you drawl. “I’m sure you remember.”

Soon there are tiny circles dotting the insides of your arms like chicken-pox marks. Perfect moons scattered among the poetry like punctuation. “These?” he asks, walking his fingers from mark to mark. You swallow, your mouth dry.

“Your cigarettes.”

“And this one?” He licks over the print his teeth have left on your neck, and you shudder.

“Yours,” you manage and your breath doesn’t catch because you’ve forgotten how to breathe. “You put that there.”

His grin is feral. You would have flinched once, months ago. Now you just stare placidly back, head cocked. Waiting.

“You’re right, pet,” he says, and runs his fingers through your hair. You don’t preen – he hates that. “Do you know why I gave you that?”

You shake your head and couldn’t look away if you tried. His eyes are the colour of dirty snow, but they’re burning fever-bright now. He kisses you harshly, like a hurricane, like a maelstrom, like you’re the best thing he’s ever tasted. It’s hard not to get caught up in it. His teeth savage your lips, your tongue, but you’ve long since grown used to the taste of blood. You moan and sigh and shiver when he answers his own question, lips against your ear.

“Because I don’t share.”

***

(The story you never tell, and he never asks about is a simple one: there’s a line on your right palm, faded into almost nothing. It was made cleanly, patched up right after, but you didn’t let it heal right – you just kept picking and picking and picking until the blood ran down your fingers and you had to wipe it on your jeans. A boy with forget-me-not blue eyes made that scar with a kitchen knife and an apologetic grimace one afternoon when the summer sun drenched the bedroom you shared and the house was quiet around you. 

You can still hear the words he said as he cut his own palm and gripped your hand too tightly, your fingers interlaced.

“So now we’re brothers for real. Now and always, okay?”

_Yeah, Robb,_ you think years later, tracing the line with the pad of your thumb. It’s late and Ramsay snores beside you and you ache right down to your bones. _Now and always._ )

**Author's Note:**

> Because did you really expect this to go well?
> 
> Thanks for reading - let me know what you think. As always, many thanks to [theonaf](http://www.theonaf.tumblr.com/), my lovely beta. And an extra thank-you to [VagrantWriter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/VagrantWriter/pseuds/VagrantWriter) for the hyper-linking tutorial. And to everyone else who commented so far - you're all awesome!
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://www.cheerynoir.tumblr.com/) !


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